Northampton High School
Why single-sex education still matters
Choosing a school is one of the biggest decisions a parent will make, and for many families across Northamptonshire, that choice increasingly comes back to a single question: would my daughter do better in a girls-only environment? At Northampton High School, the answer is woven into everything the school does. Made for Girls is the philosophy behind it, and the evidence underpinning that idea is more substantial than a strapline might suggest. Research has shown that girls’ self-confi dence can begin to fall
behind that of boys as early as age nine in mixed settings, and that gap has a habit of persisting well into adulthood. A 2019 University of Queensland study found that single-sex schools are the only setting in which this confi dence gap simply does not open up. At Northampton High, that fi nding shapes everything from how lessons are taught to how wellbeing support is structured.
T e Girls’ Day School Trust’s own research tells the same story
on a bigger scale. Its 2024 report, Designing the Future of Girls’ Education, found that although every teenager’s confi dence dips from around age 14, girls in single-sex schools bounce back faster than girls in mixed settings. Author and broadcaster Mary Ann Sieghart puts it simply in the same report: women spend a lifetime having to prove their competence in a way men rarely do, and that habit starts long before they leave school. T e wider GDST alumnae network tells a similar story. 83%
say their school changed their life for the better, and 77% credit the girls-only environment specifi cally. T e school points to these fi gures as evidence that removing gender from the classroom equation does more than feel reassuring. It changes outcomes.
Room to lead, without having to fi ght for it Take mixed-sex social dynamics out of the equation and something interesting happens. Girls take the lead roles in the school play, the captaincy on the sports pitch, the solos in the concert and the top marks in physics, not because boys have been removed from competition, but because nobody is unconsciously stepping back to let someone else take the spotlight. Northampton High frames this as one of the most practical benefi ts of the model: more girls get the chance to discover they are good at things they might otherwise have assumed were not for them.
ALL THINGS BUSINESS | 14
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
